People who correct your typos are probably jerks, according this study
Flickr/Jeremy Keith
People who correct other people's typos can be some of the biggest nuisances around — not just because they're pointing out flaws, but for the added conceit of thinking they're doing you a favor.
(An aside: I'm speaking semi-autobiographically here.)
According to a new study from the University of Michigan, that grammar-Nazi quality may actually be a pretty good proxy for a person's level of agreeableness overall.
This flies in the face of conventional thinking among linguists, the authors write, since many academics tend to see so-called grammar police as just a few ornery apples.
To see whether there actually was a connection between personality and the impulse to correct someone's writing, the research team asked 80 people through Amazon's Mechanical Turk to read a batch of emails. (That's a pretty small number of people, and not enough to draw too broad or definitive a conclusion, but it's enough to make things interesting.)
The emails either contained spelling mistakes ("teh" not "the") or grammar mistakes ("you're" not "your"). After people read the emails, they were asked to judge the sender on their "perceived intelligence, friendliness, and other attributes."
The team also administered a questionnaire that gauged people's level of extroversion and agreeableness.
Flickr/Jeremy Keith
What they found was that extroverted people tended not to harp as much on people's mistakes as introverts did — perhaps because extroverts are happier to separate a person's mistakes from their core self. Introverts may intimately connect the two.
More importantly, the team found a separate (though somewhat small) negative correlation between a person's level of agreeableness and their likelihood of highlighting the errors. The least open-minded people, in other words, were the ones who stood out as the grammar police.
So typo-obsessed people beware: Your actions do speak louder than words.
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